From July ’11 Spotlight:
An SRO crowd, including consular representatives from Turkey and Israel, welcomed Sophie Bejarano de Goldberg to the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen on May 25. Goldberg’s lecture, The Sephardic Jews of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, was based on over one hundred interviews with Jews who emigrated from the Ottoman Empire between 1880 and 1920.
Goldberg spoke movingly about her grandmother’s memories of sailing alone from Turkey at age eighteen. Her grandfather (a family friend already in Mexico) proposed after an exchange of photos and they married on the boat. “Otherwise,” said Goldberg, “the Mexican authorities would not allow her to disembark.”
Goldberg’s book Ayer, Oy y Manyana, Presencia Sefardi en Mexico (co-authored with Rosalynda Perez de Cohen and Simonette Levy de Behar) has not be translated into English yet, but Goldberg hopes to make it available to us in time for an exhibit on Jewish contributions to Mexican culture that NMMA is planning for 2014. Meanwhile, all of Goldberg’s interviews have all been converted to CD so that “a new generation can hear the sound of the Ladino language.”
To read more, visit: http://www.NationalMuseumOfMexicanArt.org.
The American Jewish Committee co-sponsored this program. Photo above is posted on the AJC Chicago website.
